Twice in the last two
decades, significant cuts in U.S. and western
military spending were foreseen: first after
the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then in the
wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But both
times military spending soon increased, and
among the factors contributing to the increase
were America’s interventions in new areas: the
Balkans in the 1990s, and Libya today.1 Hidden
from public view in both cases was the extent
to which al-Qaeda was a covert U.S. ally in
both interventions, rather than its foe.

U.S. interventions in the Balkans and then
Libya were presented by the compliant U.S. and
allied mainstream media as humanitarian.
Indeed, some Washington interventionists may
have sincerely believed this. But deeper
motivations – from oil to geostrategic
priorities – were also at work in both
instances.

In virtually all the wars
since 1989, America and Islamist factions have
been battling to determine who will control
the heartlands of Eurasia in the post-Soviet
era. In some countries – Somalia in 1993,
Afghanistan in 2001 – the conflict has been
straightforward, with each side using the
other’s excesses as an excuse for
intervention.

But there have been other
interventions in which Americans have used
al-Qaeda as a resource to increase their
influence, for example Azerbaijan in 1993.
There a pro-Moscow president was ousted after
large numbers of Arab and other foreign
mujahedin veterans were secretly imported from
Afghanistan, on an airline hastily organized
by three former veterans of the CIA’s airline
Air America. (The three, all once detailed
from the Pentagon to the CIA, were Richard
Secord, Harry Aderholt, and Ed Dearborn.)2
This was an ad hoc marriage of convenience:
the mujahedin got to defend Muslims against
Russian influence in the enclave of
Nagorno-Karabakh, while the Americans got a
new president who opened up the oilfields of
Baku to western oil companies.

The pattern of U.S.
collaboration with Muslim fundamentalists
against more secular enemies is not new. It
dates back to at least 1953, when the CIA
recruited right-wing mullahs to overthrow
Prime Minister Mossadeq in Iran, and also
began to cooperate with the Sunni Muslim
Brotherhood.3 But in Libya in 2011 we see a
more complex marriage of convenience between
US and al-Qaeda elements: one which repeats a
pattern seen in Bosnia in 1992-95, and Kosovo
in 1997-98. In those countries America
responded to a local conflict in the name of a
humanitarian intervention to restrain the side
committing atrocities. But in all three cases
both sides committed atrocities, and American
intervention in fact favored the side allied
with al-Qaeda.

The cause of intervention was
fostered in all three cases by blatant
manipulation and falsification of the facts.
What a historian has noted of the Bosnian
conflict was true also of Kosovo and is being
echoed today in Libya: though attacks were
“perpetrated by Serbs and Muslims alike,” the
pattern in western media was “that killings of
Muslims were newsworthy, while the deaths of
non-Muslims were not.”4 Reports of mass rapes
in the thousands proved to be wildly
exaggerated: a French journalist “uncovered
only four women willing to back up the
story.”5 Meanwhile in 1994 the French
intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL)
traveled to Bosnia and fervently endorsed the
case for intervention in Bosnia; in 2011
February BHL traveled to Benghazi and reprised
his interventionist role for Libya.6

In all of the countries
mentioned above, furthermore, there are signs
that some American and/or western intelligence
groups were collaborating with al-Qaeda
elements from the outset of conflict, before
the atrocities cited as a reason for
intervention.. This suggests that there were
deeper reasons for America’s interventions
including the desire of western oil companies
to exploit the petroleum reserves of Libya (as
in Iraq) without having to deal with a
troublesome and powerful strong man, or their
desire to create a strategic oil pipeline
across the Balkans (in Kosovo).7

That the U.S. would support
al-Qaeda in terrorist atrocities runs wholly
counter to impressions created by the U.S.
media. Yet this on-going unholy alliance
resurrects and builds on the alliance
underlying Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1978-79
strategy of provocation in Afghanistan, at a
time when he was President Carter’s National
Security Adviser.

In those years Brzezinski did
not hesitate to play the terrorist card
against the Soviet Union: he reinforced the
efforts of the SAVAK (the Shah of Iran’s
intelligence service) to work with the
Islamist antecedents of al-Qaeda to
destabilize Afghanistan, in a way which soon
led to a Soviet invasion of that country.8 At
the time, as he later boasted, Brzezinski told
Carter, “We now have the opportunity of giving
to the USSR its Vietnam War.”9

CIA Director William Casey
continued this strategy of using terrorists
against the USSR in Afghanistan. At first the
CIA channeled aid through the Pakistani ISI
(Interservices Intelligence Service) to their
client Afghan extremists like Gulbeddin
Hekmatyar (today one of America’s enemies in
Afghanistan). But in 1986, “Casey committed
CIA support to a long-standing ISI initiative
to recruit radical Muslims from around the
world to come to Pakistan and fight with the
Afghan Mujaheddin.”10 CIA aid now reached
their support Office of Services in Peshawar,
headed by a Palestinian, Abdullah Azzam, and
by Osama bin Laden. The al-Kifah Center, a
U.S. recruitment office for their so-called
Arab-Afghan foreign legion (the future al
Qaeda), was set up in the al-Farook mosque in
Brooklyn.11

It is important to recall
Brzezinski’s and Casey’s use of terrorists
today. For in Libya, as earlier in Kosovo and
Bosnia, there are alarming signs that America
has continued to underwrite Islamist terrorism
as a means to dismantle socialist or
quasi-socialist nations not previously in its
orbit: first the USSR, then Yugoslavia, today
Libya. As I have written elsewhere, Gaddafi
was using the wealth of Libya, the only
Mediterranean nation still armed by Russia and
independent of the NATO orbit, to impose more
and more difficult terms for western oil
companies, and to make the whole of Africa
more independent of Europe and America.12

Support for the mujahedin
included collusion in law-breaking, at a heavy
cost. In the second part of this essay, I will
show how government protection of key figures
in the Brooklyn al-Kifah Center left some of
them free, even after they were known to have
committed crimes, to engage in further
terrorist acts in the United States -- such as
the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

The U.S.-al-Qaeda
Alliance in Libya

The NATO intervention in
Libya has been presented as a humanitarian
campaign. But it is not: both factions have
been committing atrocities. Thanks in part to
the efforts of the well-connected p.r. firm
the Harbour Group, working on behalf of the
Benghazi opposition’s National Transitional
Council [NTC], Americans have heard many more
press accounts of atrocities by pro-Gaddafi
forces in Libya than by the Benghazi
opposition.13 But in fact, as the London Daily
Telegraph reported,

Under rebel control, Benghazi
residents are terrorized, many "too frightened
to drive through the dark streets at night,
fearing a shakedown or worse at the
proliferating checkpoints."

Moreover, about 1.5 million
black African migrant workers feel trapped
under suspicion of supporting the wrong side.
Numbers of them have been attacked, some
hunted down, dragged from apartments, beaten
and killed. So-called "revolutionaries" and
"freedom fighters" are, in fact, rampaging
gunmen committing atrocities airbrushed from
mainstream reports, unwilling to reveal the
new Libya if Gaddafi is deposed.14

Thomas Mountain concurs that
“Since the rebellion in Benghazi broke out
several hundred Sudanese, Somali, Ethiopian
and Eritrean guest workers have been robbed
and murdered by racist rebel militias, a fact
well hidden by the international media.”15
Such reports have continued. Recently, Human
Rights Watch accused the rebels of killing
Gaddafi supporters who were just civilians and
looting, burning and ransacking pro-Gaddafi
supporters' houses and areas.16

Americans and Europeans are
still less likely to learn from their media
that among the groups in the Benghazi
transitional coalition, certainly the most
battle-seasoned, are veterans of the Al-Jama'a
al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah bi-Libya (Libyan
Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG). The
importance of the LIFG contingent in the TNC
has been downplayed in a recent issue of the
International Business Times:

The LIFG is a radical
Islamic group which has been fighting small
scale guerrilla warfare against Gaddafi for
almost a decade. Much of the LIFG leadership
came from soldiers who fought against the
Soviet forces in Afghanistan, as part of the
Mujahedeen. Since the beginning of the
uprising reports said that some of the LIFG
has joined the TNC rebel movement on the
ground, and many accused the fighters of
having links to Al-Qaeda, which the LIFG has
since denied.

Previously however, the
LIFG had stated that its ultimate goal is to
install an Islamic state inside Libya, which
given the fact that many of its fighters are
now on the side of the TNC is quite
worrying. However as the LIFG is reported to
have a fighting force of no more than a few
thousand men, it is believed it will not be
able to cause much trouble within the
opposition.17

It remains to be seen whether
a victorious TNC would be able to contain the
Islamist aspirations of the ruthless jihadist
veterans in their ranks.

There are those who fear
that, from their years of combat in
Afghanistan and Iraq, the battle-hardened
LIFG, although probably not dominant in the
Benghazi coalition today, will come to enjoy
more influence if Benghazi ever gets to
distribute the spoils of victory. In February
2004, then-Director of Central Intelligence
George Tenet testified before the Senate
Intelligence Committee that "one of the most
immediate threats [to U.S. security in Iraq]
is from smaller international Sunni extremist
groups that have benefited from al-Qaida
links. They include ... the Libyan Islamic
Fighting Group."18 In 2007 a West Point study
reported on “the Libyan Islamic Fighting
Group's (LIFG) increasingly cooperative
relationship with al-Qaeda, which culminated
in the LIFG officially joining al-Qaeda on
November 3, 2007."19

Although Britain and the US
were well aware of the West Point assessment
of the hard-core LIFG in the Benghazi TNC
coalition, their special forces nevertheless
secretly backed the Benghazi TNC, even before
the launch of NATO air support:

The bombing of the country
came as it was revealed that hundreds of
British special forces troops have been
deployed deep inside Libya targeting Colonel
Gaddafi’s forces – and more are on standby….

In total it is understood
that just under 250 UK special forces soldiers
and their support have been in Libya since
before the launch of air strikes to enforce
the no-fly zone against Gaddafi’s forces.20

There are also reports that
U.S. Special Forces were also sent into Libya
on February 23 and 24, 2011, almost a month
before the commencement of NATO bombing.21

UK support for the
fundamentalist LIFG was in fact at least a
decade old:

Fierce clashes between
[Qadhafi's] security forces and Islamist
guerrillas erupted in Benghazi in September
1995, leaving dozens killed on both sides.
After weeks of intense fighting, the Libyan
Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) formally
declared its existence in a
communiqué calling Qadhafi's
government "an apostate regime that has
blasphemed against the faith of God
Almighty" and declaring its overthrow to be
"the foremost duty after faith in God." This
and future LIFG communiqués were
issued by Libyan Afghans who had been
granted political asylum in Britain.... The
involvement of the British government in the
LIFG campaign against Qadhafi remains the
subject of immense controversy. LIFG's next
big operation, a failed attempt to
assassinate Qadhafi in February 1996 that
killed several of his bodyguards, was later
said to have been financed by British
intelligence to the tune of $160,000,
according to ex-MI5 officer David Shayler.22

David Shayler’s detailed
account has been challenged, but many other
sources reveal that UK support for Libyan
jihadists long antedates the present
conflict.23

Even more ominous for the
future than the nationalistic LIFG may be the
fighters from the more internationalist Al
Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) who have seized
the opportunity presented by the war to enter
the conflict, and equip themselves from
Gaddafi’s looted armories.24 AQIM presents a
special concern because of recent reports
that, like other al Qaeda associates from
Afghanistan to Kosovo, it is increasingly
financed by payoffs from regional drug
traffickers.25

In short, the NATO campaign
in Libya is in support of a coalition in which
the future status of present and former
al-Qaeda allies is likely to be
strengthened.26 And western forces have been
secretly supporting them from the outset.

Similarly, Clinton’s
interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo were
presented as humanitarian. But both sides had
committed atrocities in those conflicts; Like
the western media, Washington downplayed the
Muslim atrocities because of its other
interests.

Most Americans are aware that
Clinton dispatched U.S. forces to Bosnia to
enforce the Dayton peace accords after a
well-publicized Serbian atrocity: the massacre
of thousands of Muslims at Srebrenica. Thanks
to a vigorous campaign by the p.r. firm Ruder
Finn, Americans heard a great deal about the
Srebrenica massacre, but far less about the
beheadings and other atrocities by Muslims
that preceded and helped account for it.

A major reason for the Serb
attack on Srebrenica was to deal with the
armed attacks mounted from that base on nearby
villages: “intelligence sources said it was
that harassment which precipitated the Serb
attack on the 1,500 Muslim defenders inside
the enclave.”27 General Philippe Morillon,
commander of the UN troops in Bosnia from 1992
to 1993, testified to the ICTY (International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia)
that Muslim forces based in Srebrenica had
“engaged in attacks during Orthodox holidays
and destroyed villages, massacring all the
inhabitants. This created a degree of hatred
that was quite extraordinary in the region”28
According to Prof. John Schindler,

Between May and December
1992, Muslim forces repeatedly attacked Serb
villages around Srebrenica, killing and
torturing civilians; some were mutilated and
burned alive. Even pro-Sarajevo accounts
concede that Muslim forces in
Srebrenica…murdered over 1,300 Serbs…and had
“ethnically cleansed a vast area.29

Former U.S. ambassador to
Croatia Peter Galbraith later admitted in an
interview that the U.S. administration was
aware of “small numbers of atrocities” being
committed by the foreign mujahedin in Bosnia,
but dismissed the atrocities as “in the scheme
of things not a big issue.”30

Other sources reveal that
Washington gave a tacit green light to
Croatia’s arming and augmentation of the
Muslim presence in Srebrenica.31 Soon C-130
Hercules planes. some but not all of them
Iranian, were dropping arms to the Muslims, in
violation of the international arms embargo
which the U.S. officially respected. More
Arab-Afghan mujahedin arrived as well. Many of
the airdrops and some of the mujahedin were at
Tuzla, 70 kilometers from Srebrenica.32

According to The Spectator
(London), the Pentagon was using other
countries such as Turkey and Iran in this flow
of arms and warriors:

From 1992 to 1995, the
Pentagon assisted with the movement of
thousands of Mujahideen and other Islamic
elements from Central Asia into Europe, to
fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the
Serbs. …. As part of the Dutch government’s
inquiry into the Srebrenica massacre of July
1995, Professor Cees Wiebes of Amsterdam
University compiled a report entitled
‘Intelligence and the War in Bosnia’,
published in April 2002. In it he details
the secret alliance between the Pentagon and
radical Islamic groups from the Middle East,
and their efforts to assist Bosnia’s
Muslims. By 1993, there was a vast amount of
weapons-smuggling through Croatia to the
Muslims, organised by ‘clandestine agencies’
of the USA, Turkey and Iran, in association
with a range of Islamic groups that included
Afghan Mujahideen and the pro-Iranian
Hezbollah. Arms bought by Iran and Turkey
with the financial backing of Saudi Arabia
were airlifted from the Middle East to
Bosnia — airlifts with which, Wiebes points
out, the USA was ‘very closely involved’.33

Cees Wiebes’ detailed
account, based on years of research, documents
both the case for American responsibility and
the vigorous American denials of it:

At 17.45 on 10 February
1995, the Norwegian Captain Ivan Moldestad,
a Norwegian helicopter detachment (NorAir)
pilot, stood in the doorway of his temporary
accommodation just outside Tuzla. It was
dark, and suddenly he heard the sound of the
propellers of an approaching transport
aircraft; it was unmistakably a four engine
Hercules C-130. Moldestad noticed that the
Hercules was being escorted by two jet
fighters, but could not tell their precise
type in the darkness. There were other
sightings of this secretive night-time
flight to Tuzla Air Base (TAB). A sentry who
was on guard duty outside the Norwegian
medical UN unit in Tuzla also heard and saw
the lights of the Hercules and the
accompanying jet fighters. Other UN
observers, making use of night vision
equipment, also saw the cargo aircraft and
the fighter planes concerned. The reports
were immediately forwarded to the NATO
Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) in
Vicenza and the UNPF Deny Flight Cell in
Naples. When Moldestad phoned Vicenza, he
was told that there was nothing in the air
that night, and that he must be mistaken.
When Moldestad persisted, the connection was
broken.

The secretive C-130 cargo
aircraft flights and night-time arms drops
on Tuzla caused great agitation within
UNPROFOR and the international community in
February and March 1995. When asked, a
British general responded with great
certainty to the question of the origin of
the secret supplies via TAB: ‘They were
American arms deliveries. No doubt about
that. And American private companies were
involved in these deliveries.’ This was no
surprising answer, because this general had
access to intelligence gathered by a unit of
the British Special Air Services (SAS) in
Tuzla. The aircraft had come within range of
this unit’s special night vision equipment,
and the British saw them land. It was a
confirmation that a clandestine American
operation had taken place in which arms,
ammunition and military communication
equipment were supplied to the ABiH. These
night-time operations led to much
consternation within the UN and NATO, and
were the subject of countless
speculations.34

Wiebes reports the
possibility that the C-130s, some of which
were said to have taken off from a US Air
Force base in Germany, were actually
controlled by Turkish authorities.35 But U.S.
involvement was detected in the elaborate
cover-up, from the fact that US AWACS
aircraft, which should have provided a record
of the secret flights, were either withdrawn
from duty at the relevant times, or manned
with US crews.36

A summary of Wiebes’
exhaustive report was published in the
Guardian:

The Dutch report reveals
how the Pentagon formed a secret alliance
with Islamist groups in an Iran-Contra-style
operation.

US, Turkish and Iranian
intelligence groups worked with the
Islamists in what the Dutch report calls the
"Croatian pipeline". Arms bought by Iran and
Turkey and financed by Saudi Arabia were
flown into Croatia initially by the official
Iranian airline, Iran Air, and later in a
fleet of black C-130 Hercules aircraft.

The report says that
mojahedin fighters were also flown in, and
that the US was "very closely involved" in
the operation which was in flagrant breach
of the embargo. British secret services
obtained documents proving that Iran also
arranged deliveries of arms directly to
Bosnia, it says.

The operation was promoted
by the Pentagon, rather than the CIA, which
was cautious about using Islamist groups as
a conduit for arms, and about breaching the
embargo. When the CIA tried to place its own
people on the ground in Bosnia, the agents
were threatened by the mojahedin fighters
and the Iranians who were training them.

The UN relied on American
intelligence to monitor the embargo, a
dependency which allowed Washington to
manipulate it at will.37

Meanwhile the Al-Kifah Center
in Brooklyn, which in the 1980s had supported
the “Arab-Afghans” fighting in Afghanistan,
turned its attentions to Bosnia.

Al-Kifah’s English-language
newsletter Al-Hussam (The Sword) also began
publishing regular updates on jihad action in
Bosnia….Under the control of the minions of
Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman, the newsletter
aggressively incited sympathetic Muslims to
join the jihad in Bosnia and Afghanistan
themselves….The Al-Kifah Bosnian branch office
in Zagreb, Croatia, housed in a modern,
two-story building, was evidently in close
communication with the organizational
headquarters in New York. The deputy director
of the Zagreb office, Hassan Hakim, admitted
to receiving all orders and funding directly
from the main United States office of Al-Kifah
on Atlantic Avenue controlled by Shaykh Omar
Abdel Rahman.38

One of the trainers at
al-Kifah, Rodney Hampton-El, assisted in this
support program, recruiting warriors from U.S.
Army bases like Fort Belvoir, and also
training them to be fighters in New Jersey.39
In 1995 Hampton-El was tried and convicted for
his role (along with al-Kifah leader Sheik
Omar Abdel Rahman) in the plot to blow up New
York landmarks. At the trial Hampton-El
testified how he was personally given
thousands of dollars for this project by Saudi
Crown Prince Faisal in the Washington Saudi
Embassy.40

About this time, Ayman
al-Zawahiri, today the leader of al Qaeda,
came to America to raise funds in Silicon
Valley, where he was hosted by Ali Mohamed, a
U.S. double agent and veteran of U.S. Army
Special Forces who had been the top trainer at
the Al-Kifah mosque.41 Almost certainly
al-Zawahiri’s fund-raising was in support of
the mujahedin in Bosnia, reportedly his chief
concern at the time. (“The Asian edition of
the Wall Street Journal reported that, in
1993, Mr. bin Laden had appointed Sheik Ayman
Al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaeda's second-in-command,
to direct his operations in the Balkans.”)42

Wiebes’ detailed report and
the news stories based on it corroborated
earlier charges made in 1997 by Sir Alfred
Sherman, top adviser to Margaret Thatcher and
co-founder of the influential rightwing
nationalist Centre for Policy Studies, that
“The U.S. encouraged and facilitated the
dispatch of arms to the Moslems via Iran and
Eastern Europe -- a fact which was denied in
Washington at the time in face of overwhelming
evidence.”43 This was part of his case that

The war in Bosnia was
America's war in every sense of the word. The
US administration helped start it, kept it
going, and prevented its early end. Indeed all
the indications are that it intends to
continue the war in the near future, as soon
as its Moslem proteges are fully armed and
trained.

Specifically, Sherman charged
that in 1992 Acting Secretary of State
Lawrence Eagleburger had instructed Warren
Zimmerman, U.S. Ambassador in Belgrade, to
persuade Bosnian President Izetbegovic to
renege on his agreement to preserve
Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian unity, and instead
accept American aid for an independent Bosnian
state.44

The U.S.-al-Qaeda
Alliance in Kosovo

This raises the disturbing
question: were some Americans willing to
ignore the atrocities of the al-Kifah
mujahideen in Bosnia in exchange for
mujahideen assistance in NATO’s successive
wars dismantling Yugoslavia, the last
surviving socialist republic in Europe? One
thing is clear: Sir Alfred Sherman’s
prediction in 1997 that America “intends to
continue the war in the near future” soon
proved accurate, when in 1999 American support
for al-Qaeda’s allies in Kosovo, the Kosovo
Liberation Army (KLA), led to a controversial
NATO bombing campaign.

As was widely reported at the
time, the KLA was supported both by the
networks of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, and
also by the traffic in Afghan heroin:

Some members of the Kosovo
Liberation Army, which has financed its war
effort through the sale of heroin, were
trained in terrorist camps run by
international fugitive Osama bin Laden --
who is wanted in the 1998 bombing of two
U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224
persons, including 12 Americans.45

According to former DEA agent
Michael Levine, the decision of Clinton to
back the KLA dismayed his DEA contacts who
knew it to be a major drug-trafficking
organization.46 As Ralf Mutschke of Interpol
testified to Congress,

In 1998, the U.S. State
Department listed the KLA as a terrorist
organization, indicating that it was financing
its operations with money from the
international heroin trade and loans from
Islamic countries and individuals, among them
allegedly Usama bin Laden. Another link to bin
Laden is the fact that the brother of a leader
in an Egyptian Djihad organization and also a
military commander of Usama bin Laden, was
leading an elite KLA unit during the Kosovo
conflict. [This is almost certainly Zaiman or
Mohammed al-Zawahiri, one of the brothers of
Ayman al-Zawahiri.] In 1998, the KLA was
described as a key player in the drugs for
arms business in 1998, "helping to transport 2
billion USD worth of drugs annually into
Western Europe". The KLA and other Albanian
groups seem to utilize a sophisticated network
of accounts and companies to process funds. In
1998, Germany froze two bank accounts
belonging to the "United Kosova" organization
after it had been discovered that several
hundred thousand dollars had been deposited
into those accounts by a convicted Kosovar
Albanian drug trafficker.47

According to the London
Sunday Times, the KLA’s background did not
deter the US from training and strengthening
it:

American intelligence
agents have admitted they helped to train
the Kosovo Liberation Army before Nato's
bombing of Yugoslavia. The disclosure
angered some European diplomats, who said
this had undermined moves for a political
solution to the conflict between Serbs and
Albanians. Central Intelligence Agency
officers were ceasefire monitors in Kosovo
in 1998 and 1999, developing ties with the
KLA and giving American military training
manuals and field advice on fighting the
Yugoslav army and Serbian police.

When the Organisation for
Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE),
which co-ordinated the monitoring, left
Kosovo a week before airstrikes began a year
ago, many of its satellite telephones and
global positioning systems were secretly
handed to the KLA, ensuring that guerrilla
commanders could stay in touch with Nato and
Washington. Several KLA leaders had the
mobile phone number of General Wesley Clark,
the Nato commander.48

According to former U.S. Army
Captain David Hackworth, later Newsweek's
contributing editor for defense, former US
military officers in the private U.S. military
contractor MPRI (Military Professional
Resources Incorporated) not only trained KLA
personnel, but even fought alongside them.49
This reinforced earlier reports that MPRI
personnel had also been involved in training
Croatians at the time of the illicit Croatian
arms pipeline to Bosnia.50

After Kosovo, Sherman repeated
his warnings against “expanding American
hegemony”, exercised through NATO with varying
degrees of partnership and subordination of
other players. …. The process commenced with
the deliberate break-up of Yugoslavia, led by
Germany and acquiesced in by the other
European Union members and the United States
(1991). It progressed with sanctions against
Serbia for attempting to help the western
Serbs (1992). In Bosnia America's early
involvement sparked off civil war (the
Zimmerman Visit to Izetbegovic, in the
aftermath of the Lisbon Agreement), and it
eventually matured into the bombing campaign
of 1999 and the occupation of Kosovo.51

Others suspected that
America’s involvement was motivated by its
desire to see a new Trans-Balkan pipeline and
a new U.S. military base in the Balkans to
defend it. Although such critics were
initially ridiculed, both predictions soon
proved true. The U.S.-registered AMBO
corporation, headed by former BP executive Ted
Ferguson, began construction of a pipeline
from Albania to Macedonia in 2007.52 And
nearby is a semi-permanent U.S. Army base,
Camp Bondsteel, that can hold up to 7000
soldiers.

In 2007, President George W.
Bush created a new United States Africa
Command, U.S. AFRICOM. But its HQ at present
is in Stuttgart, Germany. This has led to
speculation on the Internet that America has
its eyes on Libya’s international airport,
which the U.S. Air Force had operated as
Wheelus Air Force Base until its ouster in
1970.

II. From the First
WTC Bombing to 9/11: The Domestic U.S.
Fallout from Collusion with Terrorists

The fact that Americans have
had repeated recourse to al-Qaeda Islamists as
assets in their expansive projects does not
constitute proof that there is any long-term
systematic strategy to do so, still less that
there is a secret alliance.

I believe rather that America
is suffering from a malignant condition of
military power run amok – power which, like a
malignant cancer, tends to reproduce itself at
times in ways counterproductive to larger
goals. Those who are appointed to manage this
vast power become inured to using any
available assets, in order to sustain a
sociodynamic of global intervention that they
are, ironically, powerless to challenge or
turn around. The few dissenters who try to do
so are predictably sidelined or even ejected
from the heights of power, as not being “on
the team.”

Those in Washington who
decided to assist terrorists and drug
traffickers seem not to have considered such
“externalities” as the domestic consequences
from official dealings with criminal terrorist
networks that are global in scope. Yet the
consequences were and are real, for the
Islamist terrorists that were protected by the
US in their subversion of order in Kosovo and
other countries were soon being protected
inside the US as well. As former DEA agent
Michael Levine reported of the KLA-linked drug
networks, “These guys have a network that's
active on the streets of this country....
They're the worst elements of society that you
can imagine, and now, according to my sources
in drug enforcement, they're politically
protected.”53

In other words, Kosovars were
now enjoying the de facto protection in their
U.S. drug trafficking that had earlier been
enjoyed by the CIA’s Chinese, Cuban, Italian,
Thai, and other ethnic assets dating from the
1940s.54

Mother Jones reported in
2000, after the NATO bombing in support of the
KLA that Afghan heroin, much of it distributed
by Kosovar Albanians, now accounted for almost
20 percent of the heroin seized in America --
nearly double the percentage taken four years
earlier.55 Meanwhile in Europe, it was
estimated that “Kosovo Albanians control 40%
of Europe's heroin.”56 In addition there is a
near universal consensus that the outcome of
the war in Bosnia left al-Qaeda’s jihadists
much more strongly entrenched in the Balkans
than they had been earlier. In the words of
Professor John Schindler, Bosnia, “the most
pro-Western society in the umma [Muslim
world],” was “converted into a Jihadistan
through domestic deceit, violent conflict, and
misguided international intervention.”57

It is too soon to predict
with confidence what will be the domestic
fallout or “blowback” from NATO’s empowerment
of Islamists by creating chaos in Libya. But
the domestic consequences of similar U.S.
interventions in the past are indisputable,
and have contributed to major acts of
terrorism in this country.

American protection for the
Al-Kifah mujahedin support base in Brooklyn
led to interference in domestic U.S. law
enforcement. This enabled mujahedin recruits
at al-Kifah to plot and/or engage in a number
of domestic and foreign terrorist attacks on
America. These attacks include the first World
Trade Center bombing in 1993, the so-called
“New York landmarks plot” of 1995, and the
Embassy attacks of 1998 in Kenya and Tanzania.
Involved in all of these events were
terrorists who should have been rounded up
earlier because of crimes already committed,
but were allowed to stay free.

Central to all of these
attacks was the role of Ali Mohamed, the
former U.S. Special Forces double agent at
al-Kifah, and his trainees. Ali Mohamed,
despite being on a State Department Watch
List, had come to America around 1984, on what
an FBI consultant has called “a visa program
controlled by the CIA.”58 So did the “blind
Sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman, the leader of
al-Kifah; Rahman was issued two visas, one of
them “by a CIA officer working undercover in
the consular section of the American embassy
in Sudan.”59

Ali Mohamed trained al-Kifah
recruits in guerrilla tactics near Brooklyn.
This operation was considered so sensitive
that the New York police and the FBI later
protected two of the recruits from arrest,
when they murdered the Jewish extremist Meir
Kahane. Instead, the New York Police called
the third assassin (El Sayyid Nosair) a “lone
deranged gunman,” and released the other two
(Mahmoud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh) from
detention. This enabled Abouhalima and
Salameh, along with another Ali Mohamed
trainee (Nidal Ayyad) to take part three years
later in the first (1993) bombing of the World
Trade Center.60

Prosecutors protected Ali
Mohamed again in the 1994-95 “Landmarks”
trial, when Omar Abdul Rahman and some of
Mohamed’s trainees were convicted of
conspiring to blow up New York buildings. In
that case the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald,
named Ali Mohamed as an unindicted
co-conspirator, yet allowed him to remain
free. When the defense issued a subpoena for
Mohamed to appear in court, the prosecutor
intervened to avoid Mohamed’s having to
testify.61

Ali Mohamed was well aware of
his protected status, and used it in early
1993 to obtain his release when detained by
the RCMP at Vancouver Airport. As this episode
has so ignored in the US press, I will quote
the account of it in Canada’s premier
newspaper, the Toronto Globe and Mail:

The RCMP had their hands on
one of the key insiders of Osama bin Laden's
al-Qaeda terrorist network, but he was
released after he had Mounties call his
handler at the U.S. Federal Bureau of
Investigation.

Ali Mohamed, a Californian
of Egyptian origin who is believed to be the
highest ranking al-Qaeda member to have
landed in Canada, was working with U.S.
counterterrorist agents, playing a double or
triple game, when he was questioned in 1993.
Mr. Mohamed now is in a U.S. prison.

"The people of the RCMP
told me by midnight that I can go now," Mr.
Mohamed — who confessed in the United States
to being a close bin Laden associate — wrote
at the time in an affidavit shown Wednesday
to The Globe and Mail.

The incident happened after
customs agents at Vancouver International
Airport detained Essam Marzouk, an Egyptian
who had arrived from Damascus via Frankfurt,
after they found him carrying two forged
Saudi passports.

Mr. Mohamed, who was
waiting to pick him up at the airport,
inquired of the police about his friend's
detention. That made the RCMP curious about
Mr. Mohamed, but he dispelled their
suspicions by telling them he was a
collaborator with the FBI.62

The Globe and Mail story
makes it clear that in 1993 Mohamed already
had a handler at the FBI, to whom the RCMP
deferred. Patrick Fitzgerald, in his statement
to the 9/11 Commission, gave a quite different
story: that Mohamed, after returning from
Nairobi in 1994, applied for a job “as an FBI
translator.”63 The difference is vital:
because the FBI told the RCMP to release
Mohamed, he was then able to travel to Nairobi
and plan for bombing the U.S. Embassy there.

According to author Peter
Lance, by 2007 Fitzgerald had enough evidence
to arrest and indict Mohamed, but did not.
Instead he interviewed Mohamed in California,
along with an FBI agent, Jack Cloonan. After
the interview Fitzgerald chose not to arrest
Mohamed, but instead to tap his phone and bug
his computer. Lance asks a very relevant
question: did Fitzgerald fear that ”any
indictment of al Qaeda’s chief spy would rip
the lid off years of gross negligence by three
of America’s top intelligence agencies”?64

One month after the Embassy
bombings, Ali Mohamed was finally arrested, on
September 10, 1998. Yet when Fitzgerald handed
down thirteen indictments two months later,
Mohamed’s name was not among them. Instead
Fitzgerald again allowed him to avoid
cross-examination in court by accepting a plea
bargain, the terms of which are still partly
unknown. Specifically we do not know the term
of Mohamed’s sentence: that page of his court
appearance transcript (p. 17) is filed under
seal.65

As part of the plea bargain,
Mohamed told the court that at the personal
request of bin Laden, he did surveillance on
the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, “took pictures,
drew diagrams, and wrote a report” which he
personally delivered to bin Laden in the
Sudan.66 Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor
who negotiated the plea bargain, testified at
length about Mohamed to the 9/11 Commission,
who concluded in their Report (p. 68) that
Mohamed “led” the embassy bombing operation.
Ironically, the Embassy bombing is the
official reason today why Zawahiri (like bin
Laden before him) is wanted by the FBI, with a
$25 million bounty on his head.

But the American public has
been denied the right to learn about Ali
Mohamed’s involvement in other terrorist
events. Particularly relevant would be his
involvement in 9/11. As his FBI handler
Cloonan later reported, Mohamed explained to
him that he personally trained the accused
hijackers in how to seize planes:

He [had] conducted training
for al Qaeda on how to hijack a plane. He
ran practical exercises in Pakistan and he
said, “This is how you get a box cutter on
board. You take the knife, you remove the
blade and you wrap it in [word blacked out]
and put it in your carry-on luggage.” They’d
read the FAA regulations. They knew four
inches wouldn’t go through. “This is how you
position yourself,” he said. “I taught
people how to sit in first class. You sit
here and some sit here.” He wrote the whole
thing out.67

Conclusion

At present America is in the
midst of an unprecedented budget crisis,
brought on in large part by its multiple wars.
Nevertheless it is also on the point of
several further interventions: in Yemen,
Somalia, possibly Syria or Iran (where the CIA
is said to be in contact with the
drug-trafficking al-Qaeda offshoot
Jundallah),68 and most assuredly in Libya.

Only the American public can
stop them. But in order for the people to rise
up and cry Stop! there must first be a better
understanding of the dark alliances underlying
America’s alleged humanitarian interventions.

This awareness may increase
when Americans finally realize that there is
domestic blowback from assisting terrorists as
well. The long elaborate dance between Mohamed
and his Justice Department overseers makes it
clear that the handling of terrorists for
corrupt purposes corrupts the handlers as well
as the terrorists. Eventually both the
handlers and the handled become in effect
co-conspirators, with secrets about their
collusion both parties need to conceal.

Until the public takes
notice, that concealment of collusion will
continue. And as long as it continues, we will
continue to be denied the truth about what
collusions underlay 9/11.

Worse, we are likely to see
more terrorist attacks, at home as well as
abroad, along with more illegal, costly, and
unnecessary wars.

Peter Dale Scott is
a Research Associate of the Centre for
Research on Globalization (CRG)

Notes

1 Cf.
Telegraph (London), “Defence Cuts
in Doubt over Libya, Says Military
Adviser,“ April 7, 2011, “The Libyan
crisis has raised doubts about the
Coalition’s defence review and could force
ministers to reverse cuts including the
scrapping of Britain’s Harrier jump jets,
a senior military adviser has said,” (link).

2 Scott, The
Road to 9/11, 163-65.

3 Scott,
The Road to 9/11, 44-45; citing
Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game,
109-11; Saïd Aburish, A Brutal
Friendship, 60-61; Miles Copeland, The
Game Player, 149-54. Cf. Ian Johnson, “Washington’s Secret History
with the Muslim Brotherhood,” New York
Review of Books, February 5, 2011.

6 Schindler,
Unholy Terror, 179-80; Christian
Science Monitor, March 28, 2011. In
1994 BHL presented Bosnian leader
Izetbegovich to French President
Mitterand; in 2011 BHL arranged for three
Benghazi leaders to meet French President
Sarkozy. Cf. “Libyan rebels will recognise
Israel, Bernard-Henri Lévy tells
Netanyahu,” Radio France Internationale,
June 2, 2011, “Libya’s rebel National
Transitional Council (NTC) is ready to
recognise Israel, according to French
philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who
says he has passed the message on to
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu,” (link).

7 For
Big Oil’s complaints with Gaddafi, see Peter
Dale Scott,
"The Libyan War, American Power and the
Decline of the Petrodollar System", Asian-Pacific
Journal: Japan Focus, April 27,
2011.

8 Scott, Road
to 9/11, 77; citing Diego Cordovez
and Selig S. Harrison, Out of
Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the
Soviet Withdrawal (New York: Oxford
University Press, 16), 16.

9 Scott, Road
to 9/11, 72-75; quoting from "Les
Révélations d'un Ancien
Conseilleur de Carter: ‘Oui, la CIA est
Entrée en Afghanistan avant les
Russes...’" Le Nouvel Observateur
[Paris], January 15-21, 1998:
“B[rzezinski]: [On Jul 3, 1979] I wrote a
note to the president in which I explained
to him that in my opinion this aid was
going to induce a Soviet military
intervention.… Q: And neither do you
regret having supported Islamic
fundamentalism, which has given arms and
advice to future terrorists?

B: What is more important in
world history? The Taliban or the collapse
of the Soviet empire? Some agitated
Moslems or the liberation of Central
Europe and the end of the cold
war?”

10 Ahmed
Rashid, Taliban, 129. According to
the Spanish author Robert Montoya, the
idea originated in the elite Safari Club
that had been created by French
intelligence chief Alexandre de Marenches
in 1976, bringing together other
intelligence chiefs such as General Akhtar
Abdur Rahman of ISI in Pakistan and Kamal
Adham of Saudi Arabia (Roberto Montoya, El
Mundo [Madrid], February 16, 2003).

16Anissa Haddadi, “Does the Transitional Council
Really Represent Libyan Democracy and
Opposition to Gaddafi?” International
Business Times, July 20, 2011.

17 Haddadi,
“Does the Transitional Council Really
Represent Libyan Democracy and Opposition
to Gaddafi?” International Business
Times, July 20, 2011.

18 Center
for Defense Information, “In the
Spotlight: The Libyan Islamic Fighting
Group (LIFG),” January 18, 2005. That the
LIFG is pursuing its own goals may explain
the rebel seizure of anti-air force
missiles from captured Gaddafi armories:
these missiles, useless against Gaddafi
(who no longer has an air force) are
apparently being shipped out of Libya for
sale or use elsewhere (New York Times,
July 15, 2011).

19 December
2007 West Point Study, quoted in Webster Tarpley, “The CIA’s Libya Rebels: The
Same Terrorists who Killed US, NATO Troops
in Iraq,” Tarpley.net, March 24, 2011.

23 E.g.
Washington Post, October 7, 2001:
“Over the years, some dissidents suspected
by foreign governments of involvement in
terrorist acts have been protected by the
British government for one reason or
another from deportation or
extradition.... In the past, terrorism
experts say, Britain benefited
significantly from its willingness to
extend at least conditional hospitality to
a wide range of Arab dissidents and
opposition figures .... Mustafa Alani, a
terrorism expert at the Royal United
Services Institute for Defense Studies, a
London think tank, said [Anas] al-Liby was
probably left in legal limbo by the
British government, allowing him to be
used or discarded as circumstances
permitted.”

32“Allies and Lies,” BBC OnLine, June 22, 2001;
Wiebes, Intelligence and the War,
183. Also present at Tuzla was an American
who introduced himself as “Major Guy
Sands,” and who claimed to have been a
ten-year veteran of the Vietnam War. Cf. a
Swedish report from Tuzla, of an American
there who made no secret of his Special
Forces background (Brendan O'Shea, Crisis
at Bihac: Bosnia’s Bloody Battlefield [Stroud,
Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1998], p.
159). For reports of foreign mujahedin in
or near Tuzla, see Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s
Jihad in Europe, 74, 155, 164.

37“US used Islamists to arm
Bosnians,”Guardian,
April 22, 2002. Contrast the very
different claim by Richard Clarke, Against
All Enemies, 140: “The U.S. also
blocked Iranian and al Qaeda influence in
the country [Bosnia].”

41 Lawrence
Wright: “Zawahiri decided to look for
money in the world center of venture
capitalism-Silicon Valley. He had been to
America once before, in 1989, when he paid
a recruiting visit to the mujahideen's
Services Bureau branch office in Brooklyn.
According to the F.B.I., he returned in
the spring of 1993, this time to Santa
Clara, California, where he was greeted by
Ali Mohamed, the double agent.” For more
about Ali Mohamed, and specifically how
the FBI once told the RCMP not to detain
him (this freeing Mohamed to plan the
bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya), see
Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11,
147-60.

44 Cf.
Schindler, Unholy Terror, 74: Izetbegovic
“decided to scrap the initiative, with the
apparent encouragement of Warren
Zimmermann [sic].” (Cf. 109-10). Zimmerman
has denied that he so persuaded
Izetbegovic, writing in a letter to the New
York Times “that he had urged
Izetbegovic to ‘stick by his
commitments,’” (Steven L. Burg and Paul
Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
114).

45Washington
Times, May 4, 1999. Frank Viviano,
“Drugs Paying for Conflict in Europe,” San
Francisco Chronicle, June 10, 1994:
“Narcotics smuggling has become a prime
source of financing for civil wars already
under way -- or rapidly brewing -- in
southern Europe and the eastern
Mediterranean, according to a report
issued here this week. “The report, by the
Paris-based Observatoire Geopolitique des
Drogues, or Geopolitical Observatory of
Drugs, identifies belligerents in the
former Yugoslav republics and Turkey as
key players in the region's accelerating
drugs-for-arms traffic. “Albanian
nationalists in ethnically tense Macedonia
and the Serbian province of Kosovo have
built a vast heroin network, leading from
the opium fields of Pakistan to
black-market arms dealers in Switzerland,
which transports up to $2 billion worth of
the drug annually into the heart of
Europe, the report says. More than 500
Kosovo or Macedonian Albanians are in
prison in Switzerland for drug- or
arms-trafficking offenses, and more than
1,000 others are under indictment.”

46 Michael
Levine, New American, May 24,
1999; quoted in Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The
War on Truth, 41.

47Ralf Mutschke, testimony to Committee on the
Judiciary, December 13, 2000.

48Sunday
Times (London), March 12, 2000:
“Agim Ceku, the KLA commander in the
latter stages of the conflict, had
established American contacts through his
work in the Croatian army, which had been
modernised with the help of Military
Professional Resources Inc, an American
company specialising in military training
and procurement. This company's personnel
were in Kosovo, along with others from a
similar company, Dyncorps [sic], that
helped in the American-backed programme
for the Bosnian army.”

50 Wiebes,
Intelligence and the war in Bosnia 1992
– 1995, 190; Observer,
November 5, 1995. J.M. Berger reports from
declassified documents that MPRI’s
contract with Bosnia was arranged via a
private company headed by neocon Richard
Perle: “Controversial neocon philosopher
Richard Perle led an obscure
nongovernmental organization tasked with
hiring a private company to run the U.S.
State Department's "Train and Equip"
program in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1996.
Perle's group, the "Acquisition Support
Institute," hired Military Professional
Resources Inc., essentially a professional
mercenary company nearly as controversial
as Perle himself. It's not at all clear
what or whom is responsible for the
Institute, or why a "non-governmental,
non-profit organization" would be
responsible for selecting the recipient of
a massive State Department contract on one
of the most sensitive issues of the day.
Equipped with a collection of retired
military officers, MPRI set itself up as a
virtual extension of the U.S. government
in both Croatia and Bosnia, as documented
in an extensive set of Freedom of
Information Act documents I will be
publishing over the next several weeks.

MPRI operatives were given the run of the
country -- receiving payments and arms
from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Muslim
countries, which underwrote operations to
the tune of hundreds of millions of
dollars.
In many cases, these payments were
brokered directly by the State Department.
In some instances, funds and arms were
routed into Bosnia without State's
explicit approval but often with its
knowledge, as documented in the newly
declassified records. Unauthorized
assistance appears to have come from
Pakistan, UAE and Turkey, among others.” (Richard Perle, MPRI and Bosnian Arms
Shipments,” Intelwire, February 7, 2007).

51Sir Alfred Sherman, “The Empire for the New
Millenium?” The Centre for Peace in
Balkans, May 22, 2000.

52 Cf.
the cynical comments of the Swiss
analytical group Zeit-Fragen: (Current
Concerns, “Where’s the 8th Corridor?” September/October 2001): “By
creating a trouble spot in Kosovo the USA
is able to control Albania and with it the
planned AMBO pipeline…. The USA is showing
a conspicuous interest in controlling
these strategic transport corridor links
in the Balkans. They prohibited a project
scheduled to be constructed through
Serbia, and they offered Rumania 100
million dollars to move the route of the
planned SEEL pipeline (South Eastern
European Line) further north, to Hungary.
The Italian firm ENI had planned this
pipeline project using existing pipeline
infrastructure in Slovenia, Croatia and
Serbia. The USA bombarded the Yugoslavian
section of this infrastructure with
remarkable doggedness.”

53 Michael
Levine, New American, May 24,
1999; quoted in Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The
War on Truth, 41.

54 For
details, see Scott, American War
Machine, 84, 123, 151, etc.; Scott,
Deep Politics and the Death of JFK,
167.

55Peter Klebnikov, “Heroin Heroes,” Mother
Jones, January/February 2000.
Clinton at the same time mounted a
vigorous campaign against Colombian
heroin, increasing the demand for Afghan
heroin. As Klebnikov noted, “some White
House officials fear Kosovar heroin could
replace the Colombian supply. ‘Even if we
were to eliminate all the heroin
production in Colombia, by no means do we
think there would be no more heroin coming
into the United States,’ says Bob Agresti
of the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy. ‘Look at the numbers.
Colombia accounts for only six percent of
the world's heroin. Southwest Asia
produces 75 percent.’"

60 Scott,
Road to 9/11, 154-56, 160. Cf.
Robert L. Friedman, “The CIA and the
Sheikh,” Village Voice, March 30,
1993: “As Jack Blum, investigator for the
Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, put
it: "One of the big problems here is that
many suspects in the World Trade Center
bombing were associated with the
Mujahadeen. And there are components of
our government that are absolutely
disinterested in following that path
because it leads back to people we
supported in the Afghan war.”

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